Jeff Porcaro

It's, it's pretty good guitar solo.

I just hear, I hear, like, a, I don't know, a Jeff Porcaro on the rhythm on this.

Mm-hmm.

This could've been Luke.

Hello, ding-a-lings.

I would like to submit Michael McDonald's I Hang On Your Every Word, written by Mr.

And Mrs. McDonald with Jeff Porcaro on drums, David Pack on guitar.

Now, this is the one that that guy who asked for the already yatski'd Amy Holland version should have asked for a couple weeks ago.

These guys were players.

Steve Lukather, David Page, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Porcaro, Dave Hungate, and Bobby Kimball.

People who could move between styles because they had the vocabulary to do it.

And Hydra gave them room to be more ambitious than a band simply trying to reproduce the hits from album one.

Every song deserved the musician best suited to perform it.

The album features contributions from an extraordinary collection of players, including Jim Gordon, Jeff Porcaro, Dean Parks, Victor Feldman, Ben Binet, Timothy B. Schmidt, and Michael O'Martian.

Critics immediately recognized Pretzel Logic as another significant artistic leap.

The album became Steely Dan's third consecutive commercial success.

It does feel, even though it's got some of the same musicians who've been playing with Steely Dan, you know, regularly in the latter part of their career.

So Jeff Porcaro's on there and on drums, although he's on practically every great American record ever made, isn't he? Larry Carlton is on guitar.

So people who've been there and the same producer, Gary Katz, and Donald Fagan writing all the songs, but write them on his own as opposed to co-writing with Becker, although he'd always been pretty much the lyricist.

I think Becker didn't write the lyrics.

So...

You know, I certainly wasn't overconfident in that area, but I felt like I could play with a rhythm section because I'd been playing with Jeff Porcaro for four or five years before I started getting sessions.

Yeah, absolutely.

And before we jump into sort of the Toto years, just those early and the sessions right up in the lead to Toto, are there ones that stand out for you? Obviously, it's been very well documented, your amazing work from Steely Dan to Boz Skaggs and so on.

Tell us a little bit about that era as well.

That

was Jeff Porcaro met the guitarist who also happened to be mixing their records at the time, a guy named Denny Diaz on guitar.

And so he brought Jeff down and let Jeff experience, see the Steely Dan, meet those guys, Donald and Walter.

Long live the fighters!

Performed in Los Angeles in 77 by elite session musicians, including keyboardist David Paich, drummer Jeff Porcaro, guitarist Steve Lukather, I just hung out with Luke the other night, and bassist David Hungate, Toto exploded onto the scene with their self-titled 1978 debut album, scoring a major hit with Hold the Line.

Follow-up records, Hydra and Turn Back saw mixed commercial success, but of course the band reached global fame with 1982's Toto IV, which spawned mega hits like Rosanna, Africa, and so many more.

They swept six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

"He's in the groove." But if you listen, there are a lot of different pockets, you know.

Like for example, you could listen to Jeff Porcaro's groove or Steve Gadd or Steve Jordan, right? That's a whole other group.

Or James Gadson.

Remember Bill Withers and James Gadson?

So Walter gets the credit because I think he overdubbed the bass on this.

But there was another bass player and Jeff Porcaro was the drummer.

And just the other day we memorialized his passing, but they had them play all night long.

And Walter and Donald finally left around midnight and the band kept playing until about four o'clock in the morning and then they finally packed it.

They didn't take any of the rest of it.

And then a couple of weeks later, Rob went back and he overdubbed the piano part.

And I guess the guitar part was added in later, but they did all that work just to get one track of Jeff Porcaro on the drums, which, you know, we always joke about that, which is kind of amazing because Jeff was such a meticulous drummer that he normally would get it in one take.

But for whatever reason, you know, this pursuit of perfection like we talk about, you know, is...

Might've been later.

So those are my three, TV Party by Black Flag, She Watch Channel Zero by Public Enemy, and 57 Channels and Nothing On by Bruce Springsteen with Jeff Porcaro on drums.

What do you got?

Great picks, by the way.